"James Patrick Kelly - Itsy Bitsy Spider" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

teaching it to me. "I was a gift." She shook a teabag loose from a canister shaped like an acorn and
plunged it into the boiling water. "From Mother."
The bot offered the cup to me; I accepted it nervelessly. "That's not true." I could feel the blood
draining from my face.
"I can lie if you'd prefer, but I'd rather not." She pulled the booster chair away from the table and
turned it to face me. "There are many things about themselves that they never told us, Jen. I've always
wondered why that was."
I felt logy and a little stupid, as if I had just woken from a thirty-year nap. "She just gave you to
him?"
"And bought him this house, paid all his bills, yes."
"But why?"
"You knew her," said the bot. "I was hoping you could tell me."
I couldn't think of what to say or do. Since there was a cup in my hand, I took a sip. For an instant,
the scent of tea and dried oranges carried me back to when I was a little girl and I was sitting in Grandma
Fanelli's kitchen in a wet bathing suit, drinking Constant Comment that my father had made to keep my
teeth from chattering. There were knots like brown eyes in the pine walls and the green linoleum was
slick where I had dripped on it.
"Well?"
"It's good," I said absently and raised the cup to her. "No, really, just like I remember."
She clapped her hands in excitement. "So," said the bot. "What was Mother like?"
It was an impossible question, so I tried to let it bounce off me. But then neither of us said anything;
we just stared at each other across a yawning gulf of time and experience. In the silence, the question
stuck. Mom had died three months ago and this was the first time since the funeral that I'd thought of her
as she really had beenтАФnot the papery ghost in the hospital room. I remembered how, after she
divorced my father, she always took my calls when she was at the. office, even if it was late, and how she
used to step on imaginary brakes whenever I drove her anywhere, and how grateful I was that she didn't
cry when I told her that Rob and I were getting divorced. I thought about Easter eggs and raspberry Pop
Tarts and when she sent me to Antibes for a year when I was fourteen and that perfume she wore on my
father's open-ing nights and the way they used to waltz on the patio at the house in Waltham.
"West is walking the ball up court, setting bis offense with fifteen seconds to go on the shot
clock, nineteen in the half..."
The beanbag chair that I was in faced the picture win-dow. Behind me, I could hear the door next to
the bookcase open.
"Jones and Goodrich are in each other's jerseys down low and now Chamberlain swings over
and calls for the ball on the weak side..."
I twisted around to look over my shoulder. The great Peter Fancy was making his entrance.


Mom once told me that when she met my father, he was type-cast playing men that women fall
hopelessly in love with. He'd had great successes as Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar and Skye Masterson
in Guys and Dolls and the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The years had eroded
his good looks but had not obliterated them; from a distance he was still a handsome man. He had a
shock of close-cropped white hair. The beautiful cheekbones were still there; the chin was as sharply
defined as it had been in his first head-shot. His gray eyes were distant and a little dreamy, as if he were
preoccupied with the War of the Roses or the problem of evil.
"Jen," he said, "what's going on out here?" He still had the big voice that could reach into the second
balcony without a mike. I thought for a moment he was talking to me.
"We have company, Daddy," said the bot, in a four-year-old trill that took me by surprise. "A lady."
"I can see that it's a lady, sweetheart." He took a hand from the pocket of his jeans, stroked the
touchpad on his belt and his exolegs walked him stiffly across the room. "I'm Peter Fancy," he said.